So whenever something connected to OBDII it went into Dr Jekyll mode… And then Hyde would come out when you disconnected it? Funny shit.
That’s funny…So what’s crazy, is, if you just plugged in, you’d have no idea the cheat functionality was there.
FWIW, how the hell did the government figure this out that exactly there was an issue, without diagnostics, but simply reading code? They’d have to hire some pretty specialized tuners…OR…enlist the help of competing manufacturers for their talent. I’m betting on the latter, which would make it an interesting case for VW.
I sorta remember honda getting in trouble for a ridiculously high threshold for CELs when OBDII first was rolled out…but nothing as blatant as this.
Guess VW/Audi won’t have the budget to buy the Red Bull F1 team this year.
Guess VW/Audi won’t have the budget to buy the Red Bull F1 team this year.
Curious! First I’ve heard.
It’s not that hard to figure out. You put a sniffer up the tail pipe and measure the emissions, sans OBD2 connector.
Pretty diabolical though.
Looks like the TDI option was removed from the VW Canada configurator:
VW stock is down 40% in 2 days. Literally 40 billion euros of market cap disappeared.
Here’s a good explanation of clean diesel systems:
[quote]Let me recap: NOx (which is the pollutant in question) is formed from the high temperature of combustion, in the presence of oxygen and nitrogen (both of which are inherently present in an engine’s air charge.) Above a certain temperature the NOx production goes up rapidly.
A heat engine’s maximum theoretical efficiency is defined by the difference between the temperature of combustion and the temperature of the exhaust in Kelvin. This means that for the best efficiency and the best power output you want the temperature in the combustion chamber to be as high as possible (without melting things, of course.)
However, doing so makes a lot of NOx.
One of the ways this is managed is to use EGR – exhaust gas “recirculation.” Exhaust gasses are routed back into the incoming air stream, which dilutes it and thus reduces the maximum temperature. This attenuates NOx but at the time hurts both fuel economy and power.
“Clean diesels” also, in modern versions anyway, use what is called “DEF”, which is urea in liquid form. They inject this into the exhaust stream and, in the presence of a catalyst and heat (from the exhaust) the NOx is reduced chemically to harmless nitrogen (N2), water (H2O) and a small amount of CO2 (the carbon coming from any unburned hydrocarbon in the exhaust stream, of which there is little) using some of the heat in the process.
However, that catalytic reduction reaction is only so efficient. It does work, but it’s not possible to eliminate all of the NOx this way, so the amount coming in has to be within a certain boundary or a fair bit of it will not be reduced before the gas passes through the secondary catalyst. That appears to be what’s going on here.
Now for the speculation part: EGR in a diesel has some bad side effects and owners of ALH-engine vehicles (of which I have been one) know about it well. Specifically, the particulates in the raw exhaust stream (EGR is taken from before the catalytic converter and DPF traps) mix with the small amount of oil vapor that is inherently in the intake stream in a turbocharged engine (because the bearings are not perfectly sealed and are oil-lubricated) to produce a paste-like sludge. This deposits in the intake as that is quite a lot cooler than the exhaust stream that is being introduced and over time plugs it up.
That clogging is a maintenance pain in the ass; on the ALH engine vehicles you wind up with having to pull the intake off every 40-50k miles and clean it or it will starve the engine of air and thus both power and fuel economy. The ALH is a relatively simple design in this regard; the newer engines are not.
It is reported that there are “no” intake-clogging problems with these newer designs. What I’d like to know is if the reason there is no clogging is that EGR is basically inoperative most of the time, being engaged only when the ECU detects an emissions test cycle!
If so then the “fix” will have a modest but real impact on both power and fuel economy, but it may have a relatively-severe impact on maintenance schedules and cost. On the ALH engines removing the intake to clean it is a relatively straight-forward if messy operation (~4 hours of work or thereabouts for the guy in his garage) but I suspect that it is materially more-complex for these newer engines as integration of components has become far more commonplace.
We’ll see how this shakes out as time goes on… but I bet this code was not put in these ECUs simply to get a couple of percent higher fuel economy and power output numbers – there were other reasons for it as well, and reducing what may have been unreasonable maintenance requirements may have been a part of it.
[/quote]
While that’s an interesting summary of how EGR works, sounds kind of like speculation as to what the “defeat strategy” is. Guess we’ll find out soon because 40% means something needs to be done ASAP to stop the hemorrhaging.
Another serious issue is Americans received $51 million in income tax credits for purchasing clean diesel cars from VW ($1300 per car in question). The IRS is going to go after VW for defrauding us on the Alternative Motor Vehicle Credit.
So has VW killed anyone yet like GM and Ford have?
Nope but VW and their diesels doesn’t fit the EPA’s electric vehicle agenda
Every car sold is a liability to a manufacturer. The higher the cost to update the vehicles and bring them into compliance, the higher the liability. The truth is GM, Ford and VW aren’t worth $50B, $55B and $55B respectively. They’re not worth anything after the liabilities are subtracted out.
Running a 20th century business model in the 21st century is a losing proposition. The saddest part is VW’s only innovative software feature was to cheat the government. Underinvestment in connected, remotely updatable vehicles is going to put them in the dark ages for another decade. A certain California manufacturer could have brought literally every vehicle into compliance in 24 hours without a dealer visit. Then again, they wouldn’t bet the company on a motor invented in 1891.
VAG CEO Winterkorn just resigned.
The CEO of Porsche will likely get the nod to at least be interim CEO, if not the elected CEO.
That was already done this morning.
I wonder how likely that the same programming isn’t already on the 3L Audi and Porsche diesels. And how likely is it that BMW and Benz don’t have some form of this?
and Ford and whomever else
to be honest though it seems a far too dangerous reputation risk to take. Hard to believe they did it.
Former GM chair Bob Lutz was on and talked about why they never went big with small clean diesels to compete with VW…basically the GM engineers said ‘we can’t figure out how they do it…but we can’t compete. They’re just better at this than us’.
Turns out they weren’t lol.
Pretty sure the 3.0L TDI engines use the Urea treatment. The new 2.0L diesels (E288??) also come with Urea treatment.
Lol at that quote. Yeah it’s crazy. My bro has a A3 TDI, going to plug in the cable and check it when I see him next.
True, about the urea/Adblue/DEF. The BMW 2.0L diesel uses it, and most other diesels sold here do.
The problem was the Passat was already about $2-3k more expensive than the cars in that class. Adding the urea system would have made it $4-$5k more expensive. So they swapped out emissions for efficiency and fooled the incompetent leaders at the EPA who have an $8 billion a year budget. Some guy at an NGO testing diesel efficiency in West Virginia figured it out and informed the EPA. IMO, the head of the EPA needs to resign.